Year: 2013

The Reason For Rituals

Thinking through the function of religious rituals, Dreher grapples with what he’s learned from repeating the sacrament of confession again and again:

I’ve found over the years that eventually I get tired of bringing the same damn thing to my confessor, and that sense of accountability provides a nudge to try harder not to do the damn thing. Most of us have a tendency to hide from ourselves — to rationalize and to avoid. Once you get into the habit of confession, and the habit of mind that confession creates in you, it becomes a lot harder to hide from yourself. Some of us struggle with scrupulosity — that is, an unbalanced preoccupation with our sins. I can’t say I was ever scrupulous, strictly speaking — I’m far too lazy for that — but when I was a pious young teenager, I would pray often for specific sins to be forgiven, but never really could be sure that I was forgiven. The rite of confession, I learned later in life, gave me a sense of security in knowing that my sins had been forgiven. Somehow, I needed to hear it from a priest: “Go, your sins are forgiven.” There’s life-giving power in that.

I can’t imagine an atheist version of confession. What would it look like? How would it work, if you don’t think there’s any such thing as sin? What standards would you use to measure whether or not one had missed the mark? If you see no man (or woman) with actual spiritual authority over you, or at least as the channel of real supernatural grace, how would the ritual work to relieve the psychological burden? Of course there is a secular version of examination of conscience in the presence of a trained professional; it’s called therapy. But it’s not really the same thing as confession, as Rabbi Rieff explained to us all. Confession is about helping you achieve sanctity; therapy is about easing anxiety about your condition, which might entail changing your behavior, or might not.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

Holy Harmonies

Laura Davis contemplates what makes music sacred:

The Catholic Church makes its definition of sacred music pretty clear, stating in Musicam Sacram that music for the mass must “be holy, and therefore avoid everything that is secular.” It goes on to say that sacred music must also be “universal in this sense.” … I think it’s fair to say that the music has to be about God. The word sacred by definition must have to do with God or the gods, and most of the music of the contemporary worship movement fits this criterion. Perhaps then we should consider the purpose of sacred music: to function as part of the mass or service, most often as a part of worship. Worship derives from Old English weorthscipe ‘worthiness, acknowledgement of worth’. So if sacred music is intended to worship God, then such music must be of worth.

Kenan Malik suggests an alternative definition, one that operates “[n]ot so much as an expression of the divine, or as a set of rules and taboos, but, paradoxically perhaps, more [as] an exploration of what it means to be human”:

From the late medieval period on, ‘sacred’ art became increasingly humanized. The German critic Eric Auerbach called Dante, in the title of a famous study, a ‘poet of the secular world’. Dante’s Divine Comedy, despite its focus on the eternal and immutable features of heaven and hell, is at heart, Auerbach insisted, a very human exploration of this world. The human takes centre stage in The Divine Comedy, in way that had not happened previously in Christian thought. In this, Dante looks forward to the poets and artists of the Renaissance and beyond. Eventually the sense of transcendence in art came to be detached from religion entirely as in twentieth-century works such as Stravinky’s Rite of Spring or in Rothko’s paintings, in many of Barbara Hepworth’s figures or in Pablo Neruda’s love poems. It makes little sense to call such works of art ‘sacred’. There is, yet, a transcendent sensibility that links these to, say, works such as Bach’s Cantatas or Giotto’s frescoes or Dante’s Divine Comedy. To lose sense of that is to diminish both what is ‘sacred’ about sacred art and what is transcendent about much non-religious art.

(Video: performance of Bach’s cantata 184 “Erwünschtes Freudenlicht” (O welcome light of joy))

Fighting For A Place In The Church

Nick Ripatrazone reviews the new anthology Unruly Catholic Women Writers:

A woman, single or married, can never become ordained. Many lapsed women have told me the Church’s treatment of women is the reason they have drifted from Mass and never returned. The anger the women in this anthology feel ranges from those who have sprinted from the Church and never looked back to those who long for a return home, even if that house feels broken. My gender precludes a complete understanding of this anger, this distance.

In that vein, when I posit that the best pieces in Unruly Catholic Women do not consider the Catholic hierarchy as a formless omnibus, I do not mean those words as an apologetic retort. One can hold such an opinion, of course, but it makes for thin creative work. Sustained critique is not possible with straw men.

Consider Kaya Oakes’s excellent recent memoir, Radical Reinvention. Oakes finds spiritual direction from both women and men in the Church; she notes its imperfections while finding its ultimate perfection in Christ. There are pieces in this anthology that perfectly capture the paradox of distaste and desire. Place a complaint of the Church delivered through caricature next to the earned wit of “Exile” by Colleen Shaddox: “To be raised Catholic and switch denominations is a lot like giving up Haagen-Dazs for broccoli. You miss the richness, even if you know it’s bad for you.”

Oakes reflects on her decision to remain a practicing Catholic:

[A] female Episcopal priest [told] me that the great feminist theologians are all Catholic for a reason, “because they’re still fighting. Because they’ll be fighting for some time to come.” We can’t bless the bread, or tear it with our hands. But look closely—in the pews, in the back, some of us are lifting our hands. We can’t read the Gospel. But we read everything else. We can’t baptize the children we might bear, lay our dead to rest with those words of grief and consolation; we can’t preach, we can only offer a “reflection” once in a great while. We can’t. We cannot. …

But in that “cannot” I have heard in my church, in the church I freely choose when it tells me all of the things I can’t do, I’ve never felt denied to the point of resentment. Because, vocation? My vocation isn’t behind an altar. My vocation is putting my ass in a pew, week after week. My vocation is the vocation of billions of people, in nearly every religion. It is the vocation of showing up.

“The Porn Gap”

Drawing on data from the site Pornhub, David Holmes considers how income affects porn-viewing habits:

The most pronounced differences were observed when comparing time-on-site and page views per capita. In wealthier communities, the average visit duration was 9 minutes and 54 seconds, whereas in less wealthier communities, the average was 11 minutes and 5 seconds. However, the pageviews per capita in high income cities was 9.44 while in low income cities it was only 6.74. It could be that high-earning pornhounds are simply more efficient in their consumption. More likely this is due to faster Internet connections and higher Internet penetration in high-income communities. In other words, the income gap has led to a porn gap.

As for porn preferences, while subtle differences exist between high- and low-income cities, the top categories and search terms bear striking similarities.

In fact, the top five search terms are the same across high-income and low-income cities, although the order is different. In high-income cities, the top five are 1. Gay 2. Ebony 3. Teen 4. Lesbian and 5. MILF, while in low-income cities they are 1. Teen 2. Lesbian 3. MILF 4. Ebony 5. Gay.

Other differences: “Asian” makes the top 10 in six high-income cities but in no low income cities. “Big Dick” makes the top 10 in all 10 low-income cities but only two high-income cities (Washington, DC and Trenton, NJ). Meanwhile, “Squirt” makes the Top 10 in seven low-income cities, but only one high-income city (Hi, New York City). Finally, the highfalutin’ folks in San Jose, Boulder, Thousand Oaks, Stamford, and Napa, like their porn in HD.

A Modern Architectural Battle

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In February, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks voted unanimously (8-0) to deny landmark status to Prentice Women’s Hospital, the iconic Bertrand Goldberg building. Demolition on the building, owned by Northwestern University, began in October. Recently Alexandra Lange lamented the loss:

It was a sad day for Modernism, and a sad day for common sense: Northwestern University’s insistence that they needed that site and no other for a new biomedical lab never held up to scrutiny. It would be nice to think that Prentice would be the last structurally daring, imaginatively conceived concrete building clawed to rubble, but it probably won’t be. …

Prentice hospital was not beautiful. Its cloverleaf top is weird, even to an admirer like me. Its glassed-in bottom, as architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote in the Chicago Tribune, was “boxy” and “unremarkable.” You can tell people a building is important as often as you like, but unless they feel it, they won’t cry over its destruction, and they won’t organize so that it never happens again. Preservationists (and architecture critics, myself included) can learn to tell better stories about buildings: their secret spaces, their best angles, their relationship to history and use.

For a captivating look at the debate leading up to the demolition, watch Nathan Eddy’s short documentary “The Absent Column,” seen above.

Sizing Up Sex

UK researchers have published the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), which collected data from 2010 to 2012. Among the findings? Lesbian experiences are on the rise:

In Natsal-1 [conducted 1990-1991], less than 4 percent of British women aged 16–44 said they’d had any sexual experience or contact with a partner of the same sex. In Natsal-2 [conducted 1999-2001], that number rose to nearly 10 percent. Now it’s 16 percent. By any measure, that’s an enormous increase, more than doubling the reported rate among men. Even if you attribute most of it to changes in candor or interpretation, the willingness of so many women to admit to same-sex activity represents a big cultural shift.

Anal sex is also becoming more prevalent:

The British data confirm that anal intercourse, or at least willingness to report it, is spreading. From Natsal-1 to Natsal-2 to Natsal-3, the percentage of men aged 16-44 who reported having had anal sex in the last year rose from 7 to 12 to 17. The percentage of women rose almost in tandem, from 7 to 11 to 15. When you break down the Natsal-3 data by age, anal sex is the only act whose prevalence increases steadily as you move from older to younger cohorts.

On an annual basis, compared with other sex acts, the rate still isn’t very high. In Natsal-3, among all age groups (up to age 74), only 13 percent of men and 11 percent of women say they’ve had heterosexual anal intercourse in the last year. In the 16-24 age bracket, 19 percent of males and 17 percent of females say they’ve done it during that time. But the percentage who report having done it at least once in their lives is higher. Among the cohort born between 1946 and 1955, the proportion of men and women who said yes to this question by the time they were 35-44 was 20 percent. Among those born between 1956 and 1965, it was 30 percent. Among those born between 1966 and 1975, it’s nearly 40 percent. How high will it go? We just don’t know.

Hunting By Ski

Mark Jenkins visits the hunter-skiers of the Chinese Altay Mountains:

Serik describes a hunt when Tursen skied down on a bounding deer, leaped on its back, grabbed its antlers, and wrestled it down into the snow, the animal kicking and biting. It is a scene that has been repeated for thousands of years in these mountains. Within the Altay, a handful of petroglyphs have been discovered depicting archaic skiing scenes, including one of a human figure on skis chasing an ibex. Since petroglyphs are notoriously hard to date, it remains a controversial clue in the debate over where skiing was born. Chinese archaeologists contend it was carved 5,000 years ago. Others say it is probably only 3,000 years old. The oldest written record that alludes to skiing, a Chinese text, also points to the Altay but dates to the Western Han dynasty, which began in 206 B.C.

Norwegian archaeologists also have found ski petroglyphs, and in Russia, what appears to be a ski tip, carbon-dated to 8,000 years ago, was excavated from a peat bog. Each nation stakes its own claim to the first skiers. What is widely accepted, however, is that whoever first strapped on a pair of skis likely did so to hunt animals.

Meth In The Medicine Cabinet

You’ll find it in North Korea:

[A defector] spoke of a doctor administering Ice to a friend’s sick father: “He took it and could speak well and move his hand again five minutes later. Because of this kind of effect, elderly people really took to this medicine.” A South Korea-based NGO worker, who claims to have interviewed over 500 defectors, told me “People with chronic disease take it until they’re addicted.” Unlike heroin, crystal meth is mostly smoked or snorted, and a threadbare medical infrastructure means it’s difficult for North Koreans to find needles, Hazel Smith, a North Korea expert at Cranfield University in Britain, told me.